His sentence was commuted to life in prison!
From the New York Times:
The Texas pardons board, appointed by the governor, took the unusual action of voting 6 to 1 Wednesday to recommend commutation of Mr. Foster’s death sentence. The result was not released until Thursday morning and shortly afterward, Mr. Perry, a Republican, announced he had accepted the recommendation.
“After carefully considering the facts of this case, along with the recommendations from the Board of Pardons and Paroles, I believe the right and just decision is to commute Foster’s sentence from the death penalty to life imprisonment,” the governor said in a statement.
He said he was also concerned about the law that allowed Mr. Foster and the actual triggerman to be tried together and urged the Legislature to re-examine the issue. (more)
From Save Kenneth Foster on Blogspot:
Perry’s decision is historic. Not only has the Board of Pardons and Paroles rarely recommended clemency (by one count, 3 times since 1982), but Rick Perry has overseen more executions than any Governor of the State of Texas, including George Bush. (more)
I mentioned this case before. Even if you agree with the death penalty (I don’t), Perry’s decision to commute Foster’s sentence is important. His guilt and death sentence was largely based on the guilt of another person; he was not tried separately. Guilt by association should never be enough to have someone executed.
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The state of Texas is prepared to execute a man who did not commit murder.
Kenneth Foster is scheduled to be executed on August 30 in Texas for the murder of Michael LaHood, despite the fact that Mauriceo Brown, the person who shot LaHood, was executed in 2006. Foster was convicted under a 1974 Texas law under which the distinction between principal actor and accomplice in a crime is abolished and each may be held equally culpable.
KXAN, an Austin, TX television station did a story on his impending execution. An article in The Nation said:
Foster maintains that he did not know that Brown would either rob or kill LaHood. According to an Amnesty International investigation, there is evidence not heard at trial that the murder was an unplanned act committed by Brown, as the latter himself claimed before his execution.In 2005, a federal district judge found a “fundamental constitutional defect in Foster’s sentence” and ruled that Foster’s jury had not been asked to determine if he had any intent to kill LaHood, and that this failure represented a misapplication of the law. However, the state of Texas appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which overturned the decision.
You can take action to stop his execution at Amnesty International, or The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.
The U.S. government seems to. From a recent story in the Washington Post about CIA interrogation techniques:
The CIA techniques have come under harsh criticism from human rights groups who argue that they are abusive and torturous, especially when used in combination over long periods of time. President Bush last month signed an executive order that requires the CIA to treat detainees humanely, but a classified list of techniques that are approved for the agency’s use has been kept from public view.
If the techniques aren’t torture, why aren’t they being made public? Yes, the administration will claim that it is so the terrorists cannot develop and prepare ways to resist these techniques. But again I ask, if the techniques aren’t torture, why aren’t the techniques being made public? The terrorists already know that, if captured, they would need to keep their story straight under intense interrogation. How many ways are there to do that?
Plus, should we ever trust information gained by torture?
The United States of America should never, never, never be associated with torture. Show your disgust with this type of “interrogation” by signing Amnesty’s petition against torture.
I have added an irrepressible.info badge to our sidebar. Many countries, such as China, Saudi Arabia, and Vietnam, attempt to censor the internet people. Online critisism of their governments is restricted, and those caught face terrible consequences.
What is worse is that U.S. companies are complicit in this censorship. While Microsoft and Google have simply helped with China’s attepts to censor the internet, Yahoo! has actually given information to the Chinese government that led to the wrongful imprisonment of many Chinese citizens.
Sign Amnesty’s pledge to support freedom of speech online.
Contact Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! and ask them to stop helping these countries suppress their own people!
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